Create smarter software estimates (and stick to them!)

Albatross helps dev shops create more accurate software estimates by and stick to them. By tying your actual hours to your estimated hours Albatross makes it easy to see exactly where you're at risk of going over.

Discussion

Great work guys! Such a big and widespread problem. We Need to get this in place for our next contracted development project. Would be much better than the excel spreadsheet nightmare :)
Is there (or plans for) a client view for checking progress, commenting, etc.?

@bairdhall thanks, man! That's definitely in our plans, as well as some features to let clients adjust the estimate before the project starts by toggling line items. That way you can see which features you really want.

Hey Product Hunt! I'm so excited to finally share Albatross with you.
We built Albatross after bad estimates nearly killed our business. In 2016 we took on two big, fixed price projects. On both projects we more than doubled our estimates, meaning we were drastically undercharging for our work. It got so bad we were counting down the days we had left on a whiteboard. It was one of the most stressful times I've ever been through.
After that, we knew something had to change. We've worked hard this year to improve our processes, and out of that came the idea for Albatross.
We realized that we were tracking our time, but we had no easy way to tie it back to our original estimates. This meant we couldn't tell until it was too late when we were at risk of going over. Plus, when we went to make a new estimate, we couldn't tell what the problem areas were.
Albatross helps you leverage your data to create smarter estimates, and stick to them! Check it out and if you have any questions about Albatross or running a software shop let me know!

@andrewaskins This is such a common problem and y'all are tackling it in a smart way. Agencies & teams frequently taking on new projects should definitely check this out.
It's been fun watching your progress until this point. Have you learned anything new about the problem of inaccurate estimates since starting Albatross?

@ramykhuffash thanks, man! Love watching your progress with Letter Fuel too!
That's an awesome question. It's still a little early for us to learn from the data, but I have high hopes we'll be able to do some cool stuff with that in the future. However, I look at it as we really started Albatross when we started using a spreadsheet to compare our actual hours to our estimated hours.
One of the biggest things we've learned is most shops (us included) have no idea where they're going over. This makes it impossible to adjust your estimates in the future.
We've also learned that it's helpful to have multiple people touch each part of the project. Whereas before we might have one person on backend and one on frontend, now we try to jump around more. It makes it easier to catch things and to hold each other accountable.